


always

by openhearts



Category: Bones (TV)
Genre: F/M, The Parts in the Sum of the Whole, season five
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-09
Updated: 2010-04-09
Packaged: 2018-08-14 03:12:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7996459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openhearts/pseuds/openhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Originally posted at LiveJournal)</p><p>From the second he kisses her he knows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	always

**Author's Note:**

> First of many I'm sure.  Unbeta'd, because this feels more like a personal journal entry than fiction.  God.  It _hurts_.

He always knew he'd fucking cry.

He wasn’t always sure if she would. Maybe she’d laugh, or look at him like he was crazy. Like he was Sweets and he was completely entitled to be wrong.

But she cries.

From the second he kisses her he knows. He can feel it, can feel the stiffness and the resistance and he knows.  Her hands flatten and shove against his chest and for a second he’s not sure they haven’t pushed all the way through him.

But that’s dramatic, romantic, and just . . . he really feels it. All the way through his back, until he’s not sure there’s anything left of him that’s solid. It’s all severed, separated.

Then he’s begging. Desperate. And she’s telling him no. No, because she can’t change (she won’t.) No, because maybe someday she’ll have to leave him like her mother left her, and she can’t stand to see him look so sad.

And in that moment, he goes on auto-pilot. He feels shock setting in, numbing his nerves.

He’s gambled. He’s losing. The fortune, the win, the everything slipping through his features. No more.

And she’s crying. She’s begging him (desperate) can we still work together? Because she knows how to operate within their lines, and he’s alone on the other side. He’s shut the door on himself.

He agrees automatically. Because she’s crying, she’s asking. She needs.

He doesn’t realize what he’s said, until later. What he’s agreed to. He’ll hate himself for this. He’ll dig underneath the good in him, back down to the shit and he’ll live there for a while.

Because she’s fucking crying. There’s nothing else he knows how to do. He’s always protected her, preserved her armor. He’s never demanded so much from her on the surface.

He should have known. He kicks himself for it for a while, until he realizes:

Fuck _this_.

He’s in love with her, and she rejected him. He hates her for a while. Wants to terminate their partnership, go bet on horses or pool or women he doesn’t know. He wants to rail against the softness she never displayed until he let his guard down.

She wasn’t there for him. Not like he’s always been there, propping her up, assuring her. Fucking loving her. Her own father hasn’t loved her as much as he has. He realizes maybe he screwed it up way back then, when she told him she hated him, and he reminded her he wasn’t her father.

No, he’s not her father. Not her brother. He’s her _partner_.

It makes him hate her. It makes him hate himself. How it all got so broken so fast. Because Sweets got it half right, but he couldn’t just leave it alone.

But, if it had happened differently

if he hadn’t let Sweets force his hand. If Sweets hadn’t written that book. If she hadn’t been _her_ all this time, being everything he never wanted to end up hating . . .

His gun is always within arm’s reach, and his fingers itch for it. His aiming eye twitches. Even killing Sweets in cold blood wouldn’t solve this. It’s so fucked up that the worst crime in the world doesn’t touch it. In the deserts, in the jungles, he could aim and fire and watch the pink mist fan out from the skull of his target, and know he’d aimed right, and know no matter the morals that he’d done what he was there for and he’d never have to inflict that specific pain again. He’d kill more, many more, but this one? This one was over.

This wasn’t over.

He’d drag himself to work for months, years, hating her, wanting anything in the world but what he didn’t have, and it would never get better. He wants to bite the words out of the air and back into his mouth. Put bullets in them and watch them shatter into shrapnel and fall around her shoulders. Put fists through them until they’re misshapen into something that doesn’t even resemble what he’s really said. What he’s really done.

He broke it. He killed it. Whatever they had – it was love. He fucking loved her – loves her and she did and it never broke until he said it – it’s gone now. They’ll never be the same. He’ll always be pretending.

He hopes she won’t always remember that.

He hopes she never fucking forgets it.

_


End file.
